18
Apr
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[For Developers] ADT 20/SDK Tools r20 Previews Are Here - Brand New Property Editor(!), NDK Support, Performance Improvements, Bug Fixes Galore

Posted by in Development, News

As an Android developer, I like to keep tabs on the tools I use every day, especially ones as important as ADT for Eclipse and SDK Tools. As was the case several times before, the Android team in charge of both of them posted previews of upcoming releases of ADT 20 and SDK Tools r20, available for manual download ahead of the final releases.

Yup, you heard me correctly - 20, not 18 or 19. Even though the previous major release was 17, 18 followed up shortly after with some minor changes, and 19, even more minor, wasn't even posted to the downloads page (see here for the reason).

23
Feb
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For Developers: ADT 17 And SDK Tools r17 Previews Available For Download, Now With Network Usage, Fixed Proguard, Enhanced Lint, And More

Posted by in Development, News

In preparation for the upcoming final releases, the Android team today released ADT 17-preview (Android Developer Tools plugin for Eclipse) and SDK Tools r17-preview with the following improvements that eager developers can try out without waiting any longer.

What's New

Out of all the additions and changes, I'm mostly excited about the new network usage tool, the fix for the dreaded "Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 1" error when trying to use Proguard (oh, how many hours I wasted on this one), and the end to default ids for various layout elements. Sweet deal.

Here's the full changelog:

New Features

  • DDMS can now show the live detailed network usage of an app (More Info)
  • ProGuard
    • Bundled ProGuard updated to version 4.7.

15
Nov
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Developer Goodies: Eclipse ADT 16/Tools r16 Will Introduce Android Lint To Help You Automatically Catch Those Pesky Errors Early

Posted by in Development, News

To help Android developers automate some things and catch certain errors early on, the Android Tools team is pushing ahead with a new dev tool called Android Lint. Android Lint will be available in the next release of ADT (16) and Tools (r16).

If you're not familiar with the "lint" paradigm, a lint tool generally helps you validate your code using a certain set of rules in order to avoid common pitfalls. For example, PHP has PHPLint, JSON has jsonlint and so on.

As for Android Lint, its features at launch will include the following:

  • Missing translations (and unused translations)
  • Layout performance problems (all the issues the old layoutopt tool used to find, and more)
  • Unused resources
  • Inconsistent array sizes (when arrays are defined in multiple configurations)
  • Accessibility and internationalization problems (hardcoded strings, missing contentDescription, etc)
  • Icon problems (like missing densities, duplicate icons, wrong sizes, etc)
  • Usability problems (like not specifying an input type on a text field)
  • Manifest errors
  • and many more

You can find all the current checks Android Lint performs here.